Eowigorong
None of this is terribly surprising—in econ 101 we learn that markets work their magic when buyers and sellers are well-informed about what’s getting bought and sold, and can therefore transact with one another without fear of getting conned. The apparent failure of the Swedish schooling experiment is a lesson in the inability of markets to solve problems where it’s hard to compare the educational “product” that’s offered, and the outcomes you can observe are subject to manipulation. It’s also a reminder that the cold, hard calculations of markets aren’t necessarily suited to the realm of education. Governments don’t shut schools because they fail to turn a profit. Private equity firms do. The parents of more than 10,000 students learned this difference the hard way last year, when the Danish private equity group Axcelabruptly announced its exit from the Swedish school market, stating that it could no longer cover the continued losses. What can Americans learn about education reform from the Swedish experiment? It would be wrong to blame all of Sweden’s education problems on voucher schools—even with their rapid expansion, only about a quarter of secondary-school students are enrolled at private schools; among elementary schools, the rate is only about 13 percent. Yet the way they seem to have abetted teaching to the test and otherwise thrown Swedish education off course suggests they may be more of a problem than part of a solution. Even in a place like New York City, where charter schools have proven to be popular and successful, they enroll less than 5 percent of the city’s 1 million students. The city maintains control over its numbers through the issuing of a fixed number of charters. It’s easier for New York’s Department of Education to watch more carefully over hundreds (rather than thousands) of charter schools, pressuring the ones that are underperforming and shutting them down if they can’t turn things around. Sweden’s problems should temper the enthusiasm of reformers for free entry of new schools or even large-scale charter expansion. When markets are prone to failure, it’s probably best for regulators to maintain some oversight and control. None of this should be taken as a critique of the many high-performing charter schools in this country—the KIPP academies, the Uncommon Schools, and so forth—where solid research has shown that students who get lotteried into one of their classrooms are vastly more likely to finish high school and enroll in college, relative to kids who applied but weren’t lucky enough to get in. There’s surely a lot that can be learned from trying to uncover the secret formula that makes these high-performing charters do so well, ideas that can then be applied more broadly in public and charter schools alike. This “innovation engine” view of charter schools is the more modest position advocated by people like Norman Atkins, president of the Relay Graduate School of Education (and the founder of Uncommon Schools). “Charter schools are the Silicon Valley of Education,” Atkins told me via email, with charters incubating practices that can later spread across all schools. For students in some American cities, a school system dominated by charter-based school choice isn’t a hypothetical—it’s already arrived. Most notably, more than 90 percent of New Orleans students now attend a charter school, the result of a transformation that began more than a decade ago and accelerated in the post-Katrina years. While the state-run Recovery School District created in 2003 has itsshare of critics, credible external evaluation suggest that test scores and graduation rates have indeed improved under the districtwide takeover by charter schools. How are these improvements squared with the Swedish experience? I posed the question to Maggie Runyan-Shefa, who serves as co-CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the organization leading reform efforts in the Recovery School District. She began by observing that the school system was in such dire straits a decade or so ago that, “something radical was needed.” Unlike Sweden, which was taking a perfectly well-functioning school system and handing it over to private operators, New Orleans was starting from rock bottom. (To drive this point home, Runyan-Shefa’s predecessor, Neerav Kingsland, liked to tell the story of a class valedictorian who failed to graduate after flunking a math competency test five times.) There was a willingness to take drastic action, and, frankly, the schools had nowhere to go but up. In Runyan-Shefa’s telling, the functioning of New Orleans’ schools also departs in a critical way from a pure voucher system. As is the case in New York City, the government maintains an active regulatory role, something that surely would have Milton Friedman turning in his grave. District administrators, rather than market pressures, decide which schools stay open and which ones are forced to close. While the same was true in theory in Sweden, in practice the government rarely revoked voucher schools’ accreditations. At the same time, even if we accept New Orleans as a success story, it’s fair to ask whether similar success might have been achieved through a thorough reform of a traditional public school system. The much-vaunted schools of Finland, a country entirely free of charter schools, consistently perform near the top of the PISA rankings. There are surely many roads to scholastic salvation. And Runyan-Shefa agreed that there would be many challenges in scaling up the New Orleans model nationally. For example, one of their reform strategies involved attracting talent from across the country, which by definition can’t work once everyone’s doing it. (Recognizing that the pool of quality educators nationwide is limited, Runyan-Shefa said they are also working to develop homegrown talent.) Maybe the overall message is, as Norman Atkins of Relay GSE put it to me, “there are no panaceas” in public education. We tend to look for the silver bullet—whether it’s the glories of the market or the techno-utopian aspirations of education technology—when in fact improving educational outcomes is a hard, messy, complicated process. It’s a lesson that Swedish parents and students have learned all too well: Simply opening the floodgates to more education entrepreneurs doesn’t disrupt education. It’s just plain disruptive.